New Mounds rewiring the psychogeography of London

Stave Hill Rotherhithe

It was on the Refugee Tales walk that we ascended Stave Hill, Rotherhithe – a peculiar recently constructed mound in the centre of an urban park. Iain Sinclair remarked that we may be entering a new era of mound builders with Beckton Alp (a grass covered heap of arsenic) the Silbury Hill of this new epoch.

Taking in the view from the summit Iain says:
“The triangulation of the Shard, the Gherkin, and this new Omphalos – it’s trying rewire the psychogeography of London and undo the great energy lines and ley lines of Greenwich from the top of Greenwich Hill – this is the alternative thing and it’s deeply sinister.”

The London Hospital, Whitechapel: seen from the northern side

The London Hospital, Whitechapel: seen from the northern side
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0

Iain then talks about the mound at Whitechapel beside the London Hospital.
“It was built up at the time of the civil war as a defensive mound against the Royalists and it stayed there until relatively recent times,” and although it was demolished “the sense of it is still there”.

He spoke of how the early foundations of London were based on the four principle sacred mounds of London as described by E.O Gordon in ‘Prehistoric London – its mounds and circles’, and the relationship between the mounds “and the geometric patterns that emerged. Now the Hawksmoor pattern that you could have seen from the top of Greenwich Hill has been obliterated by Canary Wharf someone’s got to set up a new system to replace it”, and the Stave Hill mound is part of that system. “So we’ll link this to Beckton Alp, which is a mound of arsenic and a few shells left behind by Stanley Kubrick after re-staging the Vietnam War”.

Iain had found traces of the palm trees Kubrick had planted around Beckton when using it as the setting for Full Metal Jacket. He was on a walk with film-maker Chris Petit from Aldgate Pump down to the sea and they found a strange park near Beckton Alp which had stubs and “dying remnants of the palm trees that Kubrick had imported from Spain to create a sense of Vietnam”.

He took Will Self to the gigantic Woolworths at the retail park at Beckton built on the site of the old gas works – apparently it reminded Self of America due to the scale of the store, “but yet you could actually could get a very good cup of coffee”, Iain laughs, “and a big collection of dvds, I liked it a lot, but then it disappeared.”

Iron Age burial mound on the Pinehurst Estate

‘Where are we going?’, I asked as we headed north on the A10/Ermine Street
‘Ware’, replied Dave Binns
‘Yes, WHERE are we going?’
‘WARE’, he said again.
This went on for a while.
Turns out the Iron Age burial mound I was taken to look at was more in Hertford than Ware but that wouldn’t have been as much fun.

Gary from the Bermondsey Joyriders was at the wheel and had set up this excursion. I thought we were heading back into Epping Forest for some reason so it came as a surprise to find myself at the upper reaches of the River Lea. It’s a trip that has stayed with me since that July day and has somehow worked itself into the book that I’m currently working on.

 

PLAY.orchestra and Tot Hill

Lunchtime today I found myself sitting on a plastic box outside the Royal Festival Hall that produced the sound of a cello when I plonked myself down. People sat on other boxes around me that emitted the noises associated with flutes, violins etc – collectively I suppose we formed a kind of orchestra. The piece is called PLAY.orchestra, although as I sat there as an Oboe I thought Bum Orchestra might not be a bad alternative. You can then download the sound you’ve made to your phone via Bluetooth and use it as ringtone, send to friends, burn to CD or whatever. It’s the second creative use of Bluetooth technology that I’ve come across this week. The other looks like a large advertising stand in the foyer of the NFT (there’s also one in the IMAX) where you can download a clip from one of the many classic CIO public information films currently screening at the NFT. I think the use of Bluetooth as a creative tool and as a means for disseminating artistic material is quickly becoming common practice.

I went over to Westminster the other day in search of Tot Hill, one of the prehistoric mounds of London mentioned by E.O Gordon in her seminal book ‘Prehistoric London: its mounds and circles’. I’ve previously been fixated on the Penton, because I lived about a hundred yards away mainly, but I’m considering a project based around the sites, even if it’s just a walk to link them up. I knew that it was just outside Westminster Abbey but not sure where. Tothill Fields was a feature on London maps till the C18th and is commemorated by Tothill Street. Tothill Fields is now marked by the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre (opened in 1986). A friendly Abbey gatekeeper pointed out where the fields (and supposedly the mound) had been and also told me that a telephone exchange had been on the site and an old derelict building overgrown with grass. Westminster Central Methodist Hall sits on one side and was where the first U.N General Assembly was held in 1946. Along with the conference centre, the Abbey and Houses of Parliament nearby this site has maintained its ancient function as a place of congregation and worship for thousands of years.

Round the back of Middlesex Guildhall I found the relocated gate to Tothill Prison. There are several parallels between the Mounds (Penton and White Mound/Tower Hill the others) that Peter Ackroyd describes far more eloquently than I can (‘London: a biography’ p.13-15) but one symmetry he doesn’t mention is that they all housed prisons – Tower Hill probably the most famous in our history, Tothill being one of the more humane apparently and Penton Mound had the Middlesex County House of Correction on one side in Cold Bath Square.

have a look at a couple of photos I took of Tothill and PLAY.orchestra on Flickr.

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